The Search for Dignity and Respect: An Exploration of Human Universals

Adam: 

Hey friends, welcome to another episode of This Anthro Life. I'm your host, Adam Gamwell. On today's episode, we're chatting with renowned scholar Michele Lamont to discuss insights and ideas from her new book, Seeing Others. We'll be touching on the significance of narratives in shaping society, the generational shift in our approach to how we go to work, and the broader concept of dignity and respect in our lives. Michele's research offers a unique perspective. viewing societal trends through a lens of ordinary universalism. And we'll be discussing how Gen Z is spearheading a shift towards a more inclusive culture, more broadly, as well as the promising role of narratives in changing hearts and minds for philanthropic and political action. So whether it's about combating stereotypes and forging ahead with a deeper understanding of humanity, Michele's work is going to open our eyes to new possibilities. So stay tuned for this enlightening episode of This Anthro Life, and join us for a thought-provoking discussion and how we can see others. How much of a dialectic is there between both seeing, wanting to learn what it means to see others, but then also understanding how much do we actually see ourselves? I mean, I think about like an intersubjective change anyway, right? Because it's kind of like the self is defined, but defined through others.

Michele: 

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I was talking with a student of mine who's trans about erasure. And they were explaining that as a young person, they didn't know about trans, they didn't have the words to talk about that aspect of their identity. But it's a bit like as they were growing up, they got exposure to the fact that this is a thing and there's other people like this and they slowly developed the language they needed to make sense of themselves. So, and of others, of course. So, I think just going through that experience, I remember closely, very clearly, the first time that I read The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. Was it that? Or another book, maybe another… a feminist classic, but I saw the word stereotype and I didn't know that such a thing existed. And it's literally like a light bulb went on in my head thinking, oh, we perceive others to these categories that are not really who they are. And I was probably 12 years old. So that's how clearly I remember, you know, really made me think, OK, that's something that it's a reason I became a social scientist. I don't know. But to think that You could look at reality and relate to it, to these analytical categories that were not part of everyday language to make you understand how we see one another.

Adam: 

I love that too. Cause it is such a, it's, it's a funny point, you know, maybe it's just, I don't know if it's more common for folks that are social scientists or just, it kind of happens to a lot of people, but you know, you have these, this kind of these light bulb moments, oftentimes in youth, right. Where we recognize that the world. as I've perceived it is actually how I'm perceiving it, not necessarily the way that it is for everybody. You know, and the universal becomes particular, you know, in these moments.

Michele: 

And going back to the book, you know, the book spends quite a few pages explaining to, you know, non-scholars what narratives is about. And for social scientists, it's such a basic concept. But as I was writing the book, I realized you really need to explain. 

Adam:

 I think that's actually one of the pieces I really enjoyed going through your book, Seeing Others, and getting a sense of when we think about the idea of, you know, seeing and understanding how others are operating in the world and what they're looking for. The power of narrative is such an important part, right? And that we often don't realize that storytelling and the kind of through lines, the narrative through lines that we have about who we are and who others are, are so fundamental to kind of our social fabric. Always something that's important too that we think about here is that narratives don't mean that things are not real. I don't feel like I'm experiencing something. It's not that I just have a fake story in my head necessarily, but it means that they're not immutable and universal and kind of everywhere. So yeah, let's break that down a little bit and tell me a bit about how we can think about narrative and storytelling as these important parts of who we think we are, you know, especially going to folks are kind of coming into this for the first time. Like what is what is narrative? I know it sounds kind of basic, but at the same time, I think it's I think you're right. It's it's finally important piece to understand, like what is narrative and what's it doing for us?

Michele: 

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'll give you an example that is not connected to the recognition of others. But in my department recently, we're talking about climate change and One of my colleagues thought that most of what we know about climate change really has to do with what happens at the level of the physical environment and how it's being destroyed. And we were talking about the work of a scholar, which is really about perceptions of climate change and fights between groups about whether it's happening and how much. And I pointed to these studies on the constructional social problem, like is climate change really a problem or not? And I have colleague in history of science at Harvard, Naomi Oreskes, who wrote a very important book on controversies around this. So for the general listener, it would be something like, yes, changes in the physical environment are happening for real. But us as human beings, we're reading the situation through very different lenses. And the people who are in favor of fracking or exploitation of oil don't think it's a problem because they minimize the changes and they maximize, they really put a lot of emphasis on continuing profit generation. and not impeding economic growth, whereas a lot of the Gen Z's I've interviewed, for instance, are extremely concerned about the future and the destruction of the environment. So it's the same actual physical phenomenon that is seen through very different lenses. But these lenses are not lenses of our own making entirely, to the extent that there's in the universe we inhabit, there are social movements and scientists push very different interpretation of the reality. And this influences, you know, based on what we consume as news and what we read and what our friends say. The networks are also important as much as what we're exposed to in the news in framing our understanding of what's happening. So social scientists do study this. It's a whole literature called the Social Construction of Reality that anthropologists and sociologists are very involved in. And that I think has centers for environmental studies often primarily have scientists and they bring in a few social sciences, but not necessarily as much as it should. And experts in social movements, an expert in scientific controversies. It is very important that they be at the table as we're trying to address these major social problems. Because, of course, if you don't believe that climate change is a serious thing, you end up electing government that don't put this as a priority. So I gathered that Surak, the prime minister of England, of the UK, right now is paddling back because he doesn't want to. He wants to win the next election. And if he tells conservatives we have to be more serious about climate change, he won't he won't win. conservatives won't be behind him. So there's a whole set of consequences for providing different perceptions of that reality.

Adam: 

So I think that's a really important point that you brought up there in recognizing that there's always this back and forth between what the story that I think is happening, what it kind of is reality in my perspective, and then also what is, what's kind of the given or the framing, the social framing that I'm kind of coming into. And I think it's one of the interesting tensions that actually is highlighted also throughout your book because narratives are never just of our own individual making, right? It's always the social context that we live in or the kind of the social construction of reality. And at the same time, when you're thinking about what it means to see others and recognize, you know, what other what other folks are kind of going for in their lives, you focus a lot on change agents as these these folks kind of type of persona that is aimed to create a more kind of equitable and recognized based recognition based reality. So I think this is interesting. So I'd love to kind of begin to dive into this point, too, as you're thinking about when you were putting together the studies that this book kind of came out of, there's a number of them, right? As you know, let's kind of talk about some of them, the different interviews, surveys you did with folks, media, with a lot of folks around Gen Z in terms of age brackets, the emphasis that we see on, on change, right? And change agents that we want to make a more kind of progressive and recognition based type of reality for folks to live in. So one of them, I'm curious to think about how you kind of came to think about, let's, let's talk with folks in the media, medians, writers and Gen Z as these two broad categories, you know, they're interesting because there could be Gen Z media folks and there could be folks that are Gen Z that are not in media. How did those two groups crystallize as change agent arenas that we should look into for understanding building recognition?

Michele: 

Well, the idea for the book really emerged during the Trump era where like many other people, I was depressed and I felt I was surrounded by a lot of people who have the feeling of hopelessness as I did. So I decided to read in the literature on hope. And I read that, you know, a lot of this has to do with how we project ourselves into the future and that this projection is in part done through the stories we tell ourselves about what's likely to happen. And we do that normally as human beings, you know, by ourselves in our bed or whatever. But it's also, as I said, fed by the stories we hear around us. So as a social scientist, I was, of course, familiar with the concept of public sphere, which is a tool through which people talk about the public conversations we have about our world. And it's a very old concept. And the person who led in creating it is Jorgen Habermas. 20th century philosopher, and he talked about how in the coffeehouse of Vienna in previous centuries, that's where, you know, citizens got together, the men, bourgeois men who were then part of the political sphere, would talk about the matters of the day. But there's a big literature about how this has transformed this habit of deliberation about where our society should go. And now we have a new public sphere that is fed by the social media, but also by philanthropies that have become extremely professionalized. The social movements are not just spontaneous outbursts. There's also a lot of organizations out there that are aiming to create social change. So I wanted to understand what today's public sphere looks like and what are the main centers that are involved in the production of the narratives that are scaled up. There's some narratives that are diffused at a very high level that influences all of us and how we understand the world. And of course, you know, the popular culture industry is a huge thing. You know, during the pandemic, everyone spent a lot of time watching Netflix. and also listening to comedians. So I went about interviewing 185 people who are involved in the production of these narratives, and they are involved in a large set of sectors. So some of them are, for instance, Heather Boucher, who is on Joe Biden's Council of Economic Policy. Then some people are fighting against incarceration or Rashad Robinson, who's the leader of an organization called Color of Change that pushes to help with the election of more prosecutors who are into decriminalizing black populations, you know, for to for for fairness, you know, or LBGTQ leaders and TV producers or creators such as Joy Soloway, who created the show Transparent, which really provides a more multidimensional understanding of what queer people are about. And then for Gen Z's, I mean, one could describe these agents of change as producing new meanings from the bottom down. They put out meetings and they want the meaning to diffuse society at large. But there's also, you know, we know this from the knowledge we have about the diffusion of worldviews, that it comes from peers, it comes from networks, from face-to-face relationship as well. And I was partly intrigued with the young people, Gen Z's, because after decades of growing inequality, very few of them embraced the American dream. And there was a big mental health crisis in this group as well during the pandemic. And there still is. So I was very interested in where do they find their alternative that's going to give them hope if the American dream is not working for them anymore. So that's the context in which I came to. My graduate students actually, I had two wonderful graduate students do 80 interviews with Gen Zs. I did not do these myself because a lot of Gen Zs don't want to talk to boomers and they think we're because of what we did to the environment. So I had the graduate students do these interviews. And also, I have three kids who are basically Gen Zs, so I was also listening to them and trying to understand where their generation was going in terms of imagining the society of the future. So that's the context in which I decided to focus on these two groups of change agents, because indeed the Gen Zs are change agents.

Adam: 

That's a great way to Open that up, because I think what's interesting, too, is even as you as you kind of open the book to you, you start around and help us get a sense of the kind of loss of the American dream. But what's interesting is that it was it was not just Gen Z, right? You're talking about it in terms of different class groups and different age groups, too. Right. And that was, I think, a particularly powerful way to couch it, to make us as we're thinking about the question of, like, why would we see Gen Z by and large have more of a rejection of the kind of American dream ideal. We say, well, actually, if we look across the spectrum, we see it's kind of a loss across the board, which is interesting. Again, also kind of a narrative opening up there by saying it's not just, not just one second. So tell me a little bit about the kind of the scope of the problem that we, you know, this is one of these, I think also obviously in social science, we've, there's kind of an awareness for a while that the American dream is, is, you know, I always liked the comedian George Carlin's phrasing about the American dream. He said, it's called the dream cause you have to be asleep to believe it. You know,

Michele: 

That's a good one. And, you know, millennials, of course, often this is connected to the 2008 recession where millennials, you know, hit the job market at the time when it was very difficult and that generation couldn't buy houses, certainly couldn't dream of the white picket fence. So they had to come up with other things. And the Gen Zs who are those born after 98 had really to come up with new stories. So that's what I think we're seeing now. But in the book, that chapter two and chapter one, which are kind of the bad, you know, here are the bad news chapters. This is growing inequality. These are the conditions under which we live now. It's also about the chapter one is about the upper middle class and how they also face major mental health problem because of the anxiety and the feeling of being overwhelmed. that comes with, you know, a life of hyper competition that many people felt they had to live, especially after 2008, given that many of them lost jobs and they felt like, oh, I'm going to lose my job, my house. And the scare of being homeless, I think, is looming in the background. There's a lot of sense of precarity and insecurity in American society, even among college educated. people. So it's much broader. And when we look at the surveys on the American dream, many people think that most people cannot achieve it anymore, but they can achieve it. So that's also a very bizarre interpretation of what's happening. So, as you said, it's generalized. And I think the Gen Z's come up with this idea that instead of living for You know, they call it the hedonistic treadmill of consumption. You know, you work hard today so that one day you can buy a Porsche or you can buy a nice house. Instead, you should live your life now the way you want to live it. And that involves, you know, maintaining a work-life balance and developing relationships that are the kind of relationships you want to have in the world. So living a life where more focus is put on inclusion, but also on authenticity. So if you're gay, you should be out of the closet and, you know, you should live in a way that is in line with your values. And I think that's very much what they are aspiring to. And it's part of the emphasis they put on the work life balance. You know, it's I must say, at some level, they've convinced me that this makes a lot of sense. Because if you are always leading a life oriented toward competitiveness, it creates just a lot of anxiety and it's not very good for many people. Might work. I don't know if you've been watching the show Suits, which many people are now. It's a show that came out, I think in 2011, but now with the current, we talk as the Hollywood strike of writers and actors in the process of getting resolved, but There's a lot of old shows that have been released and that's one that many people are watching now. And it's about the world of the Manhattan lawyers who are all really crappy with each other and everything is about billable hours. And you look at this and you think, wow, what a life, you know? So I think a lot of people have made the decision that's not the life that they want. Working 80 hours a week or not seeing their children. There's no children in that show, for instance. None of the actors have a life besides their 80 hour a week of billable hours.

Adam: 

No, but it makes sense. I mean, it makes me think, too, also of like the earlier period drama, Mad Men, right? Kind of the same the same type of just working all the time and very poor relationships with parents. And there's like maybe two kids in that show. Exactly. But I agree, too, where it's I remember kind of feeling for a few years after I finished graduate school, I taught in a design program, kind of design anthropology. And I remember, you know, it's my first kind of like long-term exposure with Gen Z, you know, the folks that were just coming into college at the time. And I remember how refreshing it was to kind of hear these conversations and these kind of this, this, we're talking about mental health in a way that I had not heard kind of talked about in a more public space for ever. You know, it, it was like, it's been, it's, I don't know, I think it's been very nice to see it continue. Right. And like, it's only reached more of a crescendo in that conversation because it's on one level also just a little bit more I mean, I guess the kind of asking to say, let's be real about what our like mental, physical capacities are, right, in terms of what we can actually pursue and want to pursue. Um, and also aligning kind of value, right? Like my, my lifestyle with my values themselves. And I think that's really, really interesting and a nice piece. And it's like, it's also, you know, I never want to blame social media, but you also wonder too, like, this is the generation that grew up with cell phones in hand or like, you know, this kind of digital technology. So they had access to so many other kinds of stories from other people, but at the same time, like there's the challenge of the competitiveness that come from seeing the perfect Instagram life. Right. And kind of recognizing that's not healthy for me either, you know, and what that might look like. So I think there's this interesting role of technology that can kind of play there too. And you kind of talk about this in the book as well, that plays some level in terms of a plus and a minus, right? We're seeing more difference, but at the same time, it's also, you know, kind of causing some of the mental health challenges from competition.

Michele: 

Exactly. Yeah. And the people we interviewed for the book, they're certainly very attuned to how dangerous also the cancel culture that is fed by the social media has been for them and how fragile it makes them. And a number of them, of course, opt to not do it or just do like TikTok or never post or, you know, all kinds of individual strategies. And also, we have to remember, as you know, there's a big literature on bubble filters or the echo chambers. It's all about how we end up only following people like ourselves, which really drives the polarization of our society. But we have to remember that the number of people who are on social media in society is, you know, people who post, it's not more than like 20 percent, I think, of the population, or at least those were the numbers of years ago. were on it regularly, and of those, a very small percentage were posting regularly. So we don't want to exaggerate the importance overall in what people are exposed to, because the majority of Americans are still getting their news through the evening news show at dinnertime. So a lot of habits have not changed for older populations. And television still looms very large. Like I think it's hard for me to fathom.

Adam: 

I don't want to, I'm not going to judge that, but it's like, that's a lot of time for the television to be, to be on, you know?

Michele: 

Yeah. But maybe it's mostly open in the background. I don't know. But, uh, many young people never watch TV. They watch, they stream everything on their laptops. They don't even have TVs. So we have to think demographically as well, you know, in terms of where these narratives are coming from. I don't want to saturate the importance.

Adam: 

And I appreciate that point. I think that's right, because that's something that I've had a tendency to do. And, you know, that's why the more I appreciate talking with you and the more research we do realize, yeah, it's actually this one facet in one segment. Yeah. Important. But that's also the important point. I mean, to even come back to the underpinning around the idea of like, what is the public sphere today? Right. Even recognizing that there isn't one form of media that necessarily will hit everybody. Meaning that the diffusion matters, like how that narrative might get spread and who it is spread by does make a difference.

Michele: 

Yeah, and the book talks also about this notion of recognition chains, which are the mechanisms that are put in place to scale up messages. So I give the example of a Black artist, photographer, who does a video called Question Bridge, where he interviews 150 Black men throughout the U.S. with this question, what does it mean for you to be a Black man? And he finds enormous differences in their responses. But the one thing that all these interviewees have in common is the fact that as Black men, they experience a lot of stereotypes about what Black men are about. Like, I don't know. absent fathers, making baby out of wedlock, being troubled, being unemployed. And for the most part, these stereotypes don't meet at all their experience. And yet they have confronted repeatedly. And then the artist, Hank Willis Thomas, joins forces with a philanthropy called the Black Empowerment, Black Men Empowerment Group. And they use their network of over 2000 organizations throughout the U.S. to create conversation around the video in high schools and in community. groups, and this generates conversations. And it's also a way to make the people who participate, the youth in high school or the community members, to raise awareness about these stereotypes and have discussions about how to fight them. So what's really interesting here is that the philanthropies really play a central role in scaling up the narrative and in making them be for much more impact than simply face-to-face conversations. So that's also contemporary development, if you will. And the Ford Foundation, which is one of the largest foundations in the U.S., has spent a lot of resources fighting inequality. And this is their approach is based on four pillars. And one of them is about what they call changing hearts and minds. And this is done through narrative. So I find it very interesting that the major foundation, instead of simply giving their resources toward, you know, redistributing resources and fighting economic inequality, are very aware that promoting different narratives is central, transforming societies and contributes to inequality. And that was unthinkable 20 years ago, because I think in part economists so totally dominated the world of policy. that conversations about narratives simply didn't happen. And now they do. Now they're very, very prominent. There's other example like Gates Foundation has spent a lot of money studying how low income people are perceived and blamed for their situation. Because, you know, with the American dream and meritocracy, many people think, oh, the poor, they're poor because they're lazy and they just spend their money on expensive sneakers instead of changing, saving money to buy a car. you know, wrong decisions, stupid people. And instead, they really have been looking at alternative ways of showing how often people end up in very precarious situations because of their lack of resources. So if people end up being low income, it's not only, you know, they might have bad luck, there's a lot of production of structural inequality that makes it very difficult for someone to go to college if you come from, you know, low income.

Adam: 

Yeah. And that's an important point, too. It is interesting to think about this broader idea that we are now seeing kind of a shift in like on the philanthropic and policy side that that we're having narrative enter into the conversation in a way that it wasn't able to before. And that's, you know, yeah, it's on some level, like, is that the loosening of the bonds of, like, economic thinking as the only way that we can kind of approach these processes. But then also, to your point, like, seeing the actual power of being able to change those narratives through different kinds of programs and, like, let's actually confront stereotypes in our schools and have conversations with everybody and, like, actually move those, the needle there instead of just kind of saying, well, it's your fault, you know, which doesn't do anything for anybody, right?

Michele: 

Yeah. And in all fairness, I think economists themselves, you know, former president of the American Economics Association, Sheller, has written about narratives. And they are much more aware of how their methodological tools, like the quantification, the models they build, have limitations in terms of understanding aspects of reality that they're simply not equipped to study. So they're increasingly turning, I think, toward multi-methods, asking for us to have a graduate student who who studies how evaluations are made of people applying for disability support from the government. And this economic researcher approached my student to ask her to collaborate on this because he knew he was not equipped to do it. So it's interesting that they are becoming much more engaged.

Adam: 

And by no means do I want to pooh-pooh any economists themselves, right?

Michele: 

No, not always. But yeah, in all fairness too, they have their blind spots. I think every discipline has their blind spots that are tied to the methods we have.

Adam: 

I mean, 100% there too. And that's also, we like to think that anthropologists and sociologists are better at saying, we know what our blind spots are, but that's also kind of ridiculous if you think about it, right? Wouldn't it be a blind spot? Yeah, right. And I think as part of that too, I think one thing else that was really interesting that I want to kind of kind of turn this also to the, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the work that the book, the book does to us kind of helps us think about like, as we're talking about some of the, the solution oriented actions that we can take. And part of it, I think, was really interesting to me too, is that on one level, the needs of people are quite simple, right? We're in search of dignity and search of respect in our communities and in broader society. And at the same time, it's funny how difficult that can be for us to put in place structurally. And so I'd love to kind of, you know, think about this with you in, you know, some of the findings that you have found in the book, whether it's, you know, some of the methods we're seeing in philanthropy that we're seeing with, you know, Gen Z kind of living to their values. We're seeing different media writers producing shows like Transparent that are specifically about, you know, a woman transitioning later in life and building that relationship with with their children as a way to humanize queer relationships. So it's like how we're telling these stories in new ways as a need to kind of get also at that simple level that we're here to talk about dignity and respect. And that's what we're actually kind of all searching for at the end of the day. Why we ignore that or why we ignore that for so long is On one level, it seems a little bit flabbergasting, but at the same time, it's interesting to note that. How have you seen that come into play? I don't want to sound overly scientific, but was dignity and respect these underlying things that you were looking for? Were they found in the conversations? How did we come out to these fundamentals is what folks are going after.

Michele: 

Well, it came to me a little bit as a surprise. My very first book was on college educated professionals and managers in France and the U.S. And I worked as a graduate student with Pierre Bourdieu in France, who was a very important sociologist studying inequality. And he came up with this theory of cultural capital, which is basically that upper middle class people value things like familiarity with high culture, everything you learn in college. And they use this to exclude other people from prestigious, valuable resources in society. And my first book argued that he had a major blind spot for morality. In his work, he says, you know, moral people are losers. You know, they make virtue of necessity to promote morality because they cannot compete when it comes to education or socioeconomic success. So my book was based on interviews in Indianapolis, New York, Paris, and Clermont-Ferrand, which is like Indianapolis in the French Midwest, if you will. And I compared 40 people in each of these places and showed that in the four places, morality was at least as much or even more important than familiarity with high culture when they describe what kind of people my respondents viewed as worthy. So and in that first book, I didn't really talk about dignity, but I talked about how they thought you know, people are phonies are not worth respect, that you should treat people like people, you know, you should relate to people as human beings. And then I wrote a second book, which was on working class in Paris and New York, white and black in New York and white and North African and France. And their term, the dignity of working Men being the title of the book, dignity really came square center, the middle of this book, because I also show how the workers really fight this view that they are losers by viewing themselves as more moral than college educated people because they treat people like people. And also because they think college-educated people are so obsessed with and so narcissistic, so obsessed with their own success and with climbing, that they're not good friends. They'll dumb their friends. They're not taking care of their kids. They spend all their time working. So they come up with a number of criteria for evaluating others that are very centered on morality. And then moving on to another more recent book titled Getting Respect, which was about how Black people in the U.S., Brazil and Israel experience and fight racism. A lot of what's happening there is when we interviewed them about moments where they felt that they were treated unfairly, what they experienced was what we called assault on the self, being viewed as incompetent or even being invisible. So it's not a lot of the literature on racism is not having access to good school, good neighborhood, good health care. So it's about discrimination, being deprived of resources. And the book argues that when you interview people, the main thing they talk about is not resources. It's these assault on the self, which are very much has to do with respect and dignity. So the recent book, Seeing Others, kind of brings together a lot of these books I wrote over the years. And it centers on recognition and dignity because I really became, you know, thinking, OK, there's really, especially under the Trump years, there was really a need to provide a really clear message about how central this is to people and that, you know, there's a lot of ways that we perceive each other, but trying to work purposefully toward developing a lens where we talk more about what we all have in common as human beings, as opposed to constantly trying to put ourselves above and others above or below others. You know that it's a much saner way of thinking about the current dead ends of our society, because just organizing your life around competition and The pursuit of material success is now being shown to be very bad for mental health. So it's not like well-being is correlated and straightforwardly with how much resources you have. It matters. But on the other hand, if it becomes excessive, it's that's really interesting.

Adam: 

And I I'm trying to think back now, too, in terms of like my my board you reading back in the day, you know. But it's funny to think about, because you're actually totally right. I'm admitting I didn't read your first book about this. But I love the argument, though, that we're actually missing morality as a huge piece of when we're talking about cultural and social capital in terms of what makes people feel like they have a distinction over somebody else in terms of their taste or their preferences. But I think it's a really powerful point, though. And I appreciate the way you can draw that through line there, actually. The narrative through line in terms of where we are today, too, in that part, because I think that's A really important piece, you're right, because even in field research I was doing in South America and Peru with quinoa farmers and scientists, we're talking about climate change and adaptation and biodiversity of crop growth, but a lot of it also comes down to don't forget us, the farmers, as things change. And it comes to this worthiness of the self as part of that.

Michele:

Exactly, exactly. And so many claims of people who are involved in social movements are about dignity. Like you think Black Lives Matter, obviously it's about see us, see our clients, see the history of our group and how, but where it gets more complicated is that sometimes these claims of recognition are zero sum. Like if you think of Working class men who are racist, just to take an easy example, who say, well, you're just paying attention to blacks and you're forgetting us. So I think one of the big challenges is to get these various groups and movements, you know, if workers always say treat people as people, well, how about treat black people as people, you know? And inversely, you don't, or conversely, you don't want black people to say, oh, we're just not interacting with working class whites who are seeking dignity because they're racist. So, you know, there is in both view, there's a model of either you're in or out. But in fact, we lead our lives in such a way that we put up a lot with a lot of people are different with us from us. And we also are indifferent toward a lot of people. So life is not just a life of inclusion and exclusion. It's a life of toleration and coexistence. So that's also, I think, part of the story of the book. I think, frankly, if the Democratic Party wants to have a chance to win at the next election, it will depend on gaining just a little bit more support from various groups, including workers, and reminding them that you know, black workers are their allies. And, you know, as Biden is now talking more about the threat of democracy and, you know, thinking about also the workers, he's been echoing the picket line to express his solidarity for workers. And he talks about the class struggle, which is very new because he also calls workers the middle class. He doesn't use the word workers. talk about workers, which I find also quite puzzling. But all these things are about, I think, recognition and framing people differently so that they see more what we can all see more what we have.

Adam: 

I think you're right, too. It's funny. I wouldn't I don't want to speculate too deeply about the use of middle class versus workers as a as a vocabulary in Biden's choices. But it's an interesting thing to think about because it's still also, I think, kind of belies a little bit of uncomfortableness with like talking about low class as a thing that we don't want to be. So we're going to use whatever words we can to not

Michele: 

Not that out. Yeah. And he and I think he doesn't want to be viewed as being just supportive of low income people because too many Americans still see them as sponges or leeches, you know. So this is like such a strong moral boundary against low income people because they're presumed to not have self-reliance, which is so central to American individualism. So. It's a very delicate line, I think, for politicians to walk, you know, between creating togetherness and social cohesion and at the same time avoiding being viewed as supporting religions.

Adam: 

It's really tough too, and it's like this interesting piece that I'm curious to your thoughts in terms of how much we're seeing the United States kind of wrestle with like we don't see politicians use the word neoliberal but wrestle with with the like you know individualism is the only way the rugged individual you know pull yourself up by your bootstraps but this like I think Gen Z is really pushing the narrative to say, it's not just me, it's we, it has to, it's always been we, and we're going to be more we than millennials, than Gen Xers were. And so there is this narrative title push that is saying neoliberalism doesn't do well for society. Do we see that as, I'm not going to say it's Gen Z, our only hope, but… There may be our next best hope, I guess, is the way to think about that. But, you know, I guess I'm curious, like, to what extent are we going to see kind of those pushes? Like, you know, in corporations, businesses, we do see a bigger push with like, why a typical DEI initiative may not work quite as well, because it's always just saying it's, well, something individual to do, to do X, Y, Z. And, you know, we see more young people and I guess more people in general just being like, well, no, it's not just about one person's individual actions. It's actually like, what's the, is the, is the organization welcoming to people of difference?

Michele: 

Yes, that is exactly it. And, you know, recent books on the AI, like Adia Wingfield's book titled Flatlining, which is about the medical fields and how people of color are really asked to carry the burden of telling their peers, their white peers about racism and microaggression. For many of them, it's just one more damn thing they have to do in addition to putting up with racism and a lot of other things. So the current research really suggests that it's probably important to promote inclusion society-wide. And that means taking into consideration the needs of workers such as, you know, give them time to bring their mother to the doctor or bring their kids out of school, you know, like giving, acknowledging the needs of workers as caregivers as well. You know, creating a workplace that is more humane, which then also increases a lot the loyalty of employees toward the employer. And I think that's going to become even more urgent as employers have to hire Gen Z's because if they want to keep them, They will have to create workplaces that are more hospitable and welcoming to everyone. And this stark separation between the life of work where you have to hide who you are as a person and you know, present a front that is always the perfectly polished, you know, ideal worker ready to jump to orders. And this is really being questioned now.

Adam: 

Yeah, I agree, too. It's like we do we do see a shift happening. Like it seems like it began lightly in the early 2000s as millennials. But then you're at the 2008 shifted a lot of priorities in terms of what change could take place in terms of with what you can have ability to people have. Right. But then now it's like we have this this much bigger push at the current moment where it's like I am I am me, whether I'm at work or I'm at home and I have to take my mom to the doctor no matter what. So either way, you can deal with it, work or it's. Yeah, exactly. You know, in.

Michele: 

I was thinking of my hair stylist who is also an artist on the side so it's clear that her primary identity is to be an artist and she works in a hair salon to bring home the bacon so she can do what is her passion and I think that is also increasingly prevalent among Gen Zs and also the notion that they won't have the same career their whole life. So being even a non-college educated person, the meaning is changing because, you know, Etsy and a lot of other platforms are now making it possible for people to make money on the side as, you know, at the same time as they do other work that is more instrumental. So I think the relationship is also changing.

Adam: 

As a long-term side hustler, that resonates well with me. But I think one of the through lines that I also feel is really powerful you know, from your book and from your work in general is like the idea that you're now kind of calling ordinary universalism, right? This idea of like, let's actually focus on what it is that we have in common versus what divides us because A, we're seeing now that's more of a political tag dividing us versus like being a useful social category. And I appreciated how you said a bit before in terms of that, you know, it's not just this bourgeois in and out group, but like there's actually a huge amount of both like living with difference and indifference to a lot of difference that that's around us. And then like this, this helps us think about this idea of this kind of ordinary universalism as something that we can kind of keep more in mind and in our actions as we're kind of interacting with other folks. So can you break this down a little bit for us? And like, how do we move towards this idea of bringing forth that which we share, you know, or that which we have in common versus kind of focusing on the very loud polarization conversation, at least in the U.S. for now.

Michele: 

I think we need to first talk about it. As a joke in my family, when my partner asks me to do things I don't want to do, I just say, I do you, I do me. Just say, we can coexist in our difference. And I think these little sentences can go a long way. And I think one of the goal of the book was precisely to move away from that. We constantly hear in the social sciences, this language of tribalism and nudging. And really, I wanted to put out other language, you know, nudging is like stimulus response. It's like if we're a Pavlovian dog, whereas to say, no, let's populate our world with different narratives is a very different way of thinking about this. You know, it's a little bit like by being exposed to these other languages or to shows like Transparent, you progressively get to understand the complexity and why and how this middle aged person, advanced middle aged person decides to transition late in life. and get her kids to accept her as a trans woman of 60 year old. So I think this modeling is, is very, very important and giving people other ways of being. And in the book, I explained that in the early eighties, in the research project, I did a lot of interviews with the African American, sorry, North African immigrant in France, many people who are illiterate. And I was asked them, you know, what makes you similar and different from French people? And systematically, they pointed to evidence that they gathered from their daily living about what makes us different or similar. And they would say, well, we all spend nine months in our mother's womb. We all have ten fingers. We all are children of God or There's good and bad people in our races. So paying attention to this, more what drives us together than what… I mean, it might seem very voluntaristic and Pollyannish to say, let's just do this and hold our hands together. But at the same time, the book takes a position around the emphasis that is being put now on kindness, because I don't think it's just moralistic exhortation that will get us to do this. It's more like really diffusing society-wide different kinds of messages that don't have just to say, oh, we're now we're all inherently tribalistic and we just love people like ourselves, which, you know, these are interpretation of human nature that are not necessarily true. You know, people will battle about whether or not they're true, but we know very little. I think human nature is basically a set of narrative about what we share as human beings. And there's no way it's turtle all the way down. There's no way of determining what it really is. And we should just give it up and try to create a world that is more, you know, at least tolerant. And in the book, I also talk about the process by which people with HIV AIDS from 1980 until now have become destigmatized to show change is possible and more change can happen, whereas people living with obesity have remained very deeply stigmatized. So I give a paper that I co-authored with some former graduate students showing why it happened in one case and not in the other, and same things with same-sex marriage. So many changes have happened over the last decades that we cannot start with the assumption that the world will always be very exclusive and hierarchical and Darwinist. It's an exhortation, the book, to say, well, we can create societies that are more inclusive and be aware, for instance, class segregation has enormously increased over the last decades in the U.S. And most people are not aware of this, which means that college people now, in majority, have very few relationships with working class people. And it means that they are really not as well equipped to understand the challenges of people who have lives very different than theirs. Well, once you're aware of that, you can make different kind of choices about where do you send your kids in school? Is the objective to hoard as many advantages for them as possible, put them in the most exclusive schools so that they have the most advantages so that they can one day be at Harvard Law School? I don't think that's a very promising route. I think it's better to expose them to more diversity early on so that they have an appreciation for the range of

Adam: 

And I think also to highlight the humanity of all of us in this point too, right? And recognizing that, because I think the other piece that's really important there with what you're saying is that resources are not also a zero-sum game. As much as we talk about them, like we're going to run out of X, we don't live our lives that way. There's five pieces of bread and I'm going to take them all. It's like we don't walk around the store that way. We don't treat our neighbors that way. And so recognizing too that there's even this notion that we don't quantify our existence

Michele: 

and like I have X social capital and you have Y. Yeah, and also there's a lot to be gained for instance from just having pleasant relationship with your neighbors. You know, this is kind of free in some ways and it's not because I have it that you cannot have it. It's not the idea of constructing all social relations as zero sum doesn't make sense I think. And I think respect is not zero-sum. We can all have it.

Adam: 

It's a metaphor. I heard about this before. It's like gender equality is not a pie. Like you don't have less equality if I have more equality, you know, or vice versa. It's like we can all have more equality. We can all have more freedom together.

Michele: 

Exactly. And like the example of to speak about gender inequality and the We know that the life of men is much richer if they have a closer relationship with their children. And that's a huge generational difference, right? We know that 30 year old fathers want to be, and they spend much more time with their children than 70 year old fathers ever did. And in societies like Japan, where there's a strict division of labor when it comes to dealing with children. When the men retire at 55 or 60, there's a huge level of depression and suicide, in part because they're very disconnected from their family and they have very little to live for after they retire. So that's another example of the advantages of gender equality.

Adam: 

That's a great point too. Michele, this has been such a great conversation. It's funny because I feel like we've gone now full circle in terms of what's the dialectic between the individual and the narratives of society and now we're back to this point again saying When you recognize, actually, when we embrace the broader and better social narratives of inclusion and connectivity, we end up with a richer individual life, too, also as part of that. There's less suicide. There's more long-term, lifetime happiness. It's such an important piece to recognize. It's like seeing others is also about seeing ourselves in hopefully a more holistic way, too, because I am me, and we are, what's the Umbudu phrase? I am because we are notion as part of that.

Michele: 

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Good point.

Adam: 

I do, yes. And I see you have a Buddha behind you. My advertisement also.

Michele: 

Sociology meets Buddhism.

Adam:

That's always the thing. It's like, wait, can I have a Buddha in a sociological conversation? I think so. Yeah, why not, right? But I'm really excited to get the book into the eyes, ears, hands, hearts of listeners and watchers. So thank you so much for putting out the great work in the world. And it's been a thrill to chat with you. And so thank you so much for joining me today.

Michele: 

And thank you so much for the invitation. I really appreciate it. It was fun.

Adam:

And that brings us to the end of a dynamic conversation with Michele Lamont. Really, there is so much richness in the lines between universalism, competition, and the struggle for a better world. As we've heard today, this tension plays a vital role in how we seek to understand and bridge differences and potentially develop a richer, more inclusive society. So a huge thanks to Michele Lamont for her insightful contribution and for sharing her groundbreaking work with us. Now to keep the conversation rolling, head on over to our Anthrocurious sub stack if you're not already subscribed, and we're going to dive in even deeper into these intriguing concepts and so much more. You'll find additional content and be able to connect with a community of curious minds just like you. So until next time, this is Adam Gamwell, cheering you on in your pursuit of anthropological curiosity, and you're listening to This Anthro Life.